New Founde Lande

A 5300-mile tangle of cod tongues, cod cheeks, humpbacks of Notre Dame, and other fish stories.

February 2003
By
JOHN PHILLIPS

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Did you hear about the Newfie who returned his Hamburger Helper when he learned it didn't include another person?

As the trip wore on, Newfoundland continued to cough up a daily National Geographic slide show: remote inlets, coves, guts, and bays frequented by pirates, by Captain Cook, and by the Mayflower on its way to Plymouth Rock; towns in which motor vehicles have existed only since 1965; a bar with a sign that says, "We install & service hangovers"; a saloon housed in a church built in 1868, with cathedral-quality stained-glass windows and T-shirts for sale bearing the legend, "The liver is evil and must be punished"; Twilight Zone-quality fog; easterlies and westerlies and all-directionlies that nearly tore free my most prized remaining comb-over strands; and the city of St. John's itself, the "first Irish ghetto in North America," whose Victorian houses and stores are perched on hills as steep as San Francisco's and have burned to the ground with like frequency. Want proof of cultural precociousness in St. John's? There were 80 pubs here before America began its battle for independence.

By trip's end, I had shortened the 4Runner's life by 5300 miles, clicking off a series of 700-mile days during the to-and-fro. It's relaxing, competent, as carlike as any SUV in my experience. Waiting for the ferry, I slept one night in its cargo bay, wedged in there with maybe a half-inch to spare. In the logbook I recorded two beefs only: The struts supporting the rear hatch are stiff, making it slow to open. And the circular HVAC controls, which every driver initially twists, instead function only when you depress small segments of their circumferences - wholly counterintuitive, though conceivably a solution to Newfoundland's faucet dilemma.

So. Did you hear about the Newfie doctors who threatened to move to the mainland to earn equal pay?

"No, I didn't," I said, eager for the punch line. Except it wasn't a joke at all. It's a medical exodus, a genuine crisis.

Isn't that just like life? Soon as you take a second look, you find pimples on paradise.

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